Fresh poultry is commonly packaged in sealed plastic bags and placed in open top corrugated coated trays, with dry ice commonly placed on top of the bag to aid cooling, and covered for shipment. Fresh poultry processing plants are wet in the packing and coolers areas. The traditional package barrier coating has been wax curtain coating. The common body and cover package style easily fits into the manufacturing limitations of a corrugated box plant's die cutting and wax curtain coating process.
Over the years, wax alternative coatings have become quite common since the box manufacturing process is no longer limited by the wax curtain coating process and the package style alternatives have been broadened. In recent years, users have begun shipping the same product in a machine erected corner post bliss container with integral top flaps. Although this container performed satisfactory, but it has four places on the top edge and four places on the bottom corners that have corrugated flute tip edges exposed to the processing plant free wetness. The barrier coating applied to the container exterior does not cover these open flute tips. Top flap closure panels are also limited in size by this generic container style.
A conventional four sided internal flange bliss container generates good stacking performance with an efficient use of materials. The bliss wrap provides the top, bottom and sides for containment with relatively light weight materials. The heavier weight, flanged end panels are laminated to the side walls and secured to the wrap bottom and side edges to complete the container containment and generate significant container stacking compression strength from the four two ply corners.
The corner post bliss is an improvement over the conventional four sided bliss. The corner post bliss has end panels with extra vertical scores to create diagonal corners between the end and side walls. The wrap has extended glue flanges that stretch over the corner void and secured to the main panel of the end creating a corner post. The exterior of the container remains rectangular. The inside is eight sided. The finished package generates more compression strength with twelve single ply corners. The wrap blank size is larger than the four sided bliss wrap. The external outside corners have exposed flutes on the top and bottom edges.
Some Bliss-style containers have modified corners wherein a diagonal corner panel extends across each corner to increase the stacking strength, but in these conventional modified corner Bliss-style containers there is nothing behind the angled panel except the edge of the wrapper and the wrapper flange that is secured to the end panel. Moreover, these modified corner design of the flanges on the wrapper must be relatively wide to reach past where the diagonal corner panel joins the end panel. This results in weak areas in the bottom of the container at each corner.
Accordingly, there is need to for a container that has superior stacking strength and resistance to distortion when transverse forces are applied to the ends or sides of the container.